technology
Virginia Datacentre Project Halted by Court Ruling and Backer Withdrawal
The 2,000-acre Prince William Digital Gateway site in Virginia was stopped after a local court ruling and the exit of a key backer. The project joins other large-scale datacentre plans cancelled or delayed worldwide due to energy and local opposition issues.
Jul 7, 5:00 AM·1m read1 source
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The Prince William Digital Gateway project on a 2,000-acre site in Virginia near a Civil War battlefield was halted after a local court ruling and the withdrawal of a key backer, The Guardian reported. The development is now listed among cancelled projects. The Uptime Institute identified 250 global datacentre projects exceeding 100MW in energy demand announced between 2021 and 2024.
Approximately half of those projects will either not proceed or face delays, according to the institute. Mega-projects cancelled last year include Project Range in Arizona and the Cyberjaya campus in Malaysia. The Prince William site is also on the cancelled list.
Google stated its cloud business is compute-constrained. Uptime identified six mega-projects last year each targeting at least 5GW of power, with five in the United States and one in the United Arab Emirates. Planned datacentre projects announced last year, running at 25 percent of planned power capacity, would consume 1.3 percent of the world’s projected electricity usage for 2025, Uptime said.
About 80 percent of the new power demand comes from US projects. In California, datacentres stand empty for years because the local grid cannot supply power. An Australian developer recently sued the Dutch grid after its connection request was rejected in Amsterdam.
The seven largest planned datacentres propose a combined 45GW of onsite power, with gas as the primary source, according to a Uptime report published in January. JLL expects around 1,200 datacentres to be built globally by 2030. Lease signings and groundbreakings for the first half of 2026 are slightly ahead of JLL estimates, Andrew Batson of JLL said.
